Mom has hit some ‘Stormy Weather’

My mother has been sick, very sick with pneumonia. It has ravaged her fragile body and she is now in a rehabilitation facility trying to get her strength back.

Her name is Helen Rowland, but everyone calls her Hunna. She is 93 years old, but don’t ever announce her age or she will get testy. Hunna will lecture you that she is merely “nine-three.” Don’t ever say “ninety three.” That’s sinful,” she’ll chide you.

At her age illnesses, including serious ones, are to be expected. Still, I find myself puzzled by this strange turn of events, as if she would go on forever. She has always been a fighter, battling blindness from macular degeneration, crippling rheumatoid arthritis, kidney failure and a host of other ailments and sorrows.

She has buried two men: Her husband and my father, John Rowland, who died of cancer at 61; and in more recent years her beloved Don, her boyfriend and constant companion for more than 20 years.

After Don’s death, my mother moved to the Wentworth Home in Dover, an assisted living facility right next to the hospital. Hunna’s blindness and her gnarled arthritic bones make it necessary for some help with daily living tasks. The home is a good place for her — like family. They watch over her, make sure she is eating enough and taking her medications.

The pneumonia was a stealthy attacker. One day my mother was fine; the next day she was deathly ill. One night I got a phone call from a nurse at the home who reported Hunna wasn’t feeling well and had a slight temperature. We decided to see if she was better the next morning, but she wasn’t. My oldest brother, Tom, took her next door to Wentworth-Douglass Hospital where a chest x-ray confirmed pneumonia. She was admitted, given antibiotics and discharged the following Monday. But she wasn’t herself. She had always been so sharp mentally; now she was confused. She randomly broke into song belting out the Billie Holiday jazz classic “Stormy Weather.” I was pretty sure my mother was trying to channel Lena Horne who sang her own version of the tune in the early 1940s.

“Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky

Stormy weather

Since my man and I ain’t together,

Keeps rainin’ all the time …”

Though my mother was out of her head singing it, the song could not have been more appropriate. Stifling heat and humidity settled in and she struggled to do the simplest things, like eat and stay awake. Before pneumonia, she had been able to wheel about the home on her own with a walker. But, now she couldn’t get out of her reclining chair without the help of at least two people. Wentworth Home called and said she needed to go back to the hospital. She was too weak to stay there and they were not staffed to take care of her.

It was 95 degrees outside when I went to pick her up. It took three of us (me and two nurses) to get Hunna into my car. I drove next door to the hospital and pulled my vehicle onto the sidewalk of the emergency room, left the air-conditioner running and ran in to get help. Five people came out to assist me in getting my mom back into the hospital.

The folks in the emergency room admitted her, but were clear. My mother, they said, did not belong there. The pneumonia was gone and they were adamant: The hospital was for people who were actually sick. Hunna was weak and confused, but that didn’t mean she qualified for a hospital stay. They gave her a room and a social worker came to find out where we wanted to send her next. We ended up sending her to Langdon Place in Dover to see if she can recover enough to go back to the Wentworth Home. And that’s where she remains.

“I’m doing everything they tell me do,” she says. “I want to get out of here, but I don’t know if I can.”

She hasn’t been singing “Stormy Weather” lately, but some confusion lingers and her once voracious appetite has all but disappeared.

I don’t know what’s next for Hunna — stormy weather or maybe a break in the clouds? It’s hard to say and isn’t up to us. I’ve been trying to visit a lot to keep her grounded so her mind won’t float away.

Life — especially at “nine-three” — is fragile and we don’t get to choose how or when we leave it.

Mary Pat Rowland is managing editor of Foster’s and reachable at mprowland@fosters.com.

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